Because starving them to death is better than the alternatives, presumably?

Another day, another wacky attempt to make parents feel inadequate. This time, courtesy of The Guardian, for whom I usually have a little respect. Their Bad Science column is quite good at debunking the sort of "boffins say" journalism perpetrated by other papers.

Today, however, we find a lengthy exposition of how bad the modern diet is for children and how 90% of all children will become obese during their lifetime.

Now, I've seen that factoid from some bunch of worthies called Future Choices bandied around a few times and I still haven't seen any backing for it that I'm prepared to believe (or any evidence for it at all, come to that). This article goes as far as saying

The percentage of the population that is overweight increases with age - so among two-year-olds it might be only 3%, at 10 years old it might be 9%, but by the time they get to 15 years old it is about 17%. It keeps increasing year on year.

Presumably we are invited to assume that the line simply carries on going upwards until it hits 90%, some time around the current average life expectancy in the UK?

Perhaps there's a lateral thinking option here that nobody's spotted... let's take steps to reduce the average life expectancy to around 40. That way, far more people will die long before they become obese. Simple.

Anyway, I took a wander through the whole article to see what they say we should not be feeding children:

• Fast Food. The implied criticism of McDonalds, pizza, KFC and chip wrappers from those nasty lower class people next door tells us all we need to know here.
• Cereals. Sugar and salt. Evil in a box.
• Crisps. Well if cereal is criticised for having "as much salt as a bag of crisps" one has to assume that crisps won't be favoured, either.
• Veggie burgers & vegetarian sausages. Again an artery-furring amount of salt in every faux-meat mouthful.
• Baked beans
• Burgers (the real, meaty version). Again, lots of salt but now with added fat, apparently.
• Processed foods, generally. Nice and specific there, then. Thanks
• Sweetened soft drinks like cola, lemonade. The clue's in the name. All that sugar is just a problem, Mkay.
• Squash drinks (it stipulates diluted squash, but I assume that you also have a problem if you drink your squash undiluted), also too sugary
  
• Oh and fruit juice as well. Great. More sugary than cola apparently. Naughty oranges, how dare you.
• Fresh fruit, too. Too calorific. Apparently.
• Processed meat, including ham, sausage, chorizo. The salt used in the processing makes carcinogens magically appear in the meat, it seems.
• Cereal bars. Again too sugary (although after the ham-cancer thing, I expect the average Frusli bar probably makes pianos fall on your head)
• Refined carbohydrates - that's white bread, all pasta, rice and peeled potato.

Wow. That's some list. Let's just check, what does the article say we can eat? Well, from what I can see, the following foods get a positive mention:

• potatoes with the skin on
• cabbage leaves
• carrots
• home baked bread (but wholegrain only)
• oily fish (not specifically mentioned as a positive but their absence from childrens' diets is mentioned negatively)

Well, I don't know about getting children enthused about that as a set of dietary options. Frankly it makes me depressed to the point of suicide/comfort eating* (delete as applicable).

But are there two elephants in the room here?

The whole article points out that the government is keen to tackle obesity through diet through its Change4Life campaign (rather undermining its ongoing literacy campaigns in the process, I fear) and seems to push all of the responsibility onto us as the consumers.

Yet so much of the problem seems to be with food production and processing. There is a brief mention of the fact that Kellogs and Pepsi are sponsoring the project which suggests issues of bias but these aren't followed up. There's a subsequent reference to the fact that food processors put far too much salt and sugar into their foods, but again it's our fault for buying such terrible foods as baked beans and cereal, not theirs for taking a healthy food and stuffing unnecessary stuff into it. I can't help wondering if that's fair or reasonable.

There seems to be a parallel here with the other ongoing government campaign to get us all recycling our rubbish and cutting down on the amount of waste we produce. Rather than addressing the source of the problem - manufacturers who put two or three separate wrappers on each item for no real reason - they choose to harrangue the consumer for failing to get rid of all this rubbish that is foisted on us.

Think about the amount of good that could be done simply by getting one major food manufacturer to change their production - in terms of less salt & sugar, as well as less packaging - compared to how many individuals would have to change, to achieve the same result. Given the failure of previous targets set for us as individual consumers, I can't help thinking that a trick has been missed here. I don't know exactly how long we've been told to "eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a day" but it still seems that we're a long way from it, as a citizenry. And bear in mind that in other countries the official target is actually far higher, but our government realised early that they'd never get us to eat the proper number of portions a day, so they went for just the 5.

And still failed.

But I detect a deeper resignation in the article. There is a reference to the genetics of obesity which isn't really followed beyond a single line that is quickly dismissed. However, the resignation seems to be from more than this. It seems to suggest to me that whatever you eat, there is a risk of obesity. To be able to eat and completely avoid obesity requires so much care, planning and thought - practically micromanaging your diet down to the mouthful - that it becomes impossible. So why bother?

And that leads us to the second elephant: the assumption that it's only through dietary change that we will tackle obesity. No real reference is given to exercise in the article, beyond pointing out to us that it is what Change4Life is focussing on (not really a surprise when it's being funded by sugar dealers). There's a snide, passing reference to the idea that when children hit their mid-teens they stop playing sports and move on to the more sedate tonsil hockey but not much beyond that.

And maybe there's a bigger social point being missed here to do with exercise. The need for a stodgy lump of mystery meat, wrapped in greasy pastry was far greater when your pie had to survive a morning being carted around a coal mine in a pocket and its health effects were probably far more balanced if your morning's work was hours of hard physical effort in some kind of manufacturing job.

But now, Britain doesn't have a manufacturing base worth a damn and the overwhelming majority of us sit at a desk all day at work. The physical exertion required to type on a computer, answer phones or attend meeting hardly compares with the manufacturing jobs that formed so much of the life of the country for the previous 150+ years. Yet our diet hasn't changed to reflect this and the government has been entirely happy to push us towards service industry jobs without realising it's treating us like we still break rocks for eight hours a day. Lack of joined up policy thinking there, much?

So, while we'd all love to be eating only healthy food, it seems that finding food that is unequivocally healthy is nearly impossible. So that leaves us with exercise as the main alternative.

And I suppose we end up with this terrifying bunch of future Olympians (don't like the look of yours much) and, in doing so, maybe we come full circle. OK, let's overlook their clearly ridiculous claim that

We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight

If it's in their genes, doesn't that imply that the father and mother are also related? Ugly thought, move on. Oh and anyone who claims that student life leaves them too busy to exercise is clearly lying, especially when "student" translates to "trainee hairdresser."

But still; a family that claims it doesn't know how to cook healthy food has been let down by education. A family that refers to "All that healthy food, like fruit and veg" has been let down by education. But equally, a family that thinks the cheap option is "cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner" has been let down as well.

Clearly there ARE healthier foods and less healthy foods. Clearly a daily diet that is entirely processed carbohydrate and lard isn't great. But the Chawner family aren't the only ones working to that model. The World Cancer Research Fund seems all too keen to make the logical leap between eating sausages or ham within a balanced diet to "if you eat two sausages and a ham sandwich every day from childhood onwards, for decades, it is likely to be increasing your risk of colorectal cancer".

The point here that is being missed is that there is a balance. Life is a continual series of risks but in order to get any decent experiences out of it, you have to make decisions about balancing risk with reward, surely?

You can take what seems to be the nearest to a zero-risk approach to diet - eating only home made wholegrain bread and cabbage - if you want, but will you really gain from it? You're just as likely to find yourself suffering from malnourishment, or be told that excessive cabbage intake is bad for you.

Instead why can't we have the balanced picture coming out of initiatives like Change4Life or articles like that? There is a safe and enjoyable path to walk between the wholegrain cabbage sandwich diet and the two sausages and a ham sandwich every day for decades (or endless bacon butties and microwave pies). Try treating us like intelligent people rather than idiots who will only understand binary scenarios (all good v all bad) would be a nice start. I bet the Chawner family got healthy eating education at school, but didn't pay much attention because it was patronising and treated them like idiots. Ironic really.

And once you've started treating individuals like individuals with some degree of intelligence, why not move on to tackling the bigger issues like getting food manufacturers to produce food, rather than a cocktail of chemicals designed to taste like something familiar.

Government say facebook is making attention spans too sho - hey what's that!

Ok, so a great piece of epic fail from our wonderful Government is what I choose to start this blog.

The Guardian reports on a great and in no way daft piece of research from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution (in other words someone who is probably paid enough to know better)

Facebook et al risk "infantilising" the human mind

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.
...
She told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

Where to start? OK, how about:

When you were a kid (or for those of you with kids) do you really think that every interaction experienced by children is full of "cohesive narrative and long term significance"? My recollection is that most of what I talked about as a child was whatever was at the top of my mind at that moment. I certainly don't recall Beckett lurking at the corner of the playground listening in to conversations to try and capture some dialogue hints.

Maybe that's just me.

But the other thing is that this seems to be another example of public policy thinking being about 15 years behind reality. Is a long attention span necessarily the great virtue it once was?

Information hits us at such a rate and from so many different sources now that the ability to handle multiple strands of activity and move confidently between them surely has to be a more important mental skill than the ability to focus on one concept for lengthy periods.

I'm not saying that there is never a need for concentration, or an attention span. Just that clinging on to this odd train of logic which says "modern culture leads to shorter attention spans which is bad" has been around for decades and I'm not entirely sure it's true or that it's necessarily a bad thing.

But hey, it's not like this report has been taken seriously by anyone who's in charge of setting educational policy or censorship laws, is it? Ah. Oh.

This way for the grand launch party

Well, another millisecond, another blog enters the world to little applause (author pauses briefly to add "blog" to his browser's spell check dictionary).

So, what's going on here, then? I hear nobody ask.

The theory is that I'll use this place to dump all manner of stuff (hence the title, see this hasn't just been thrown together). Stuff that's rattling around in my brain; stuff that's prompted by something I've read or seen. Stuff that, well you get the idea.

My blog, my stuff. Feel free to read and comment, or not.